“It wasn’t called ‘Le Show’ when it started,” Shearer said. “I think I had the nerve to call it ‘The Hour of Power’ as a satirical swipe at the Rev. Robert Schuller, who protested almost immediately. Then I changed it to ‘Voice of America’ because I figured that wasn’t being used domestically.

“It started out as a place for me to do satirical comedy every week, to be with an audience and to have a place to write and create without having to do standup and entertain drunks for a living. Presumably, at the time of day the show goes out, most people are still sober. I can’t speak for here.”

“It had a lot more music originally,” Shearer said. “I did a lot less talking, and over the years that proportion has changed for many reasons, one of which is I don’t like to play a lot of the same music over and over again, and there’s a finite amount of music that I like. Second, during the run-up to the Iraq war I noticed that increasingly (thanks to the Internet) I could read and hear news from all over the world, and that what was being reported in this country during the run-up to the war didn’t necessarily match what one could hear or read in England and Australia. And I thought, ‘Gee, I can read and hear this stuff, and I have a microphone. I might as well put the two together.’ In short order came the flood in New Orleans, and one had the same experience. What we knew here did not match what people around the rest of the country knew.

“Willy-nilly it’s become more involved with sharing information than it ever was intended to be.”

The above list of Shearer’s credits was incomplete, as two upcoming projects reveal. One is pending domestic distribution for “Nixon’s the One,” a TV-miniseries re-creation of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes (with Shearer as Nixon), which will follow the locally produced online TV series “What’s With Honey Poo Poo?” The other is the annual “Judith Owen and Harry Shearer’s Holiday Sing-A-Long” show. After road dates in London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, its local dates are 7 p.m. Dec. 21 and 6 p.m. Dec. 22 in the Stephen Goldring Hall at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. As usual, many local musicians will participate.

And there’s a fourth decade (or beyond) of weekly radio.

“When I’m actually down to getting an idea and writing a piece and going on the air … that’s all still really fulfilling,” Shearer said, adding he also likes the idea that “now it’s graduated from that one station to being a mini-mass medium that goes around the world and has all these different tentacles and reaches an audience of some size.

“And nobody is between me and (the audience),” he added. “There are no meetings or memos. I do a thing and people like it or don’t like it, respond to it or don’t respond to it. It’s the purest form of show business I know about. I recognize how dear it is, and it does give me great fulfillment doing it.”